Monday, July 27, 2009

Quality Control

John and I, are of course, against this nationalized health care crap. Last week, I read that in Britain, they did not allow for a 22 year old to have a liver transplant because they (the doctors) concluded that this 22 year old man could not promised them that he would kick his alcohol addiction so instead they let him die. Hmm...of course, the mother had no option but was left to watch her son die fully knowing there was a liver organ for him. I'm not sure I want the Doctors and/or the government to have such a big decision on who lives and who dies. BTW: Britain does have a nationalized health care program just like Canadians! -Sandra.

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Who Lives, Who Dies?By Chuck Colson

In a world of rationed health care, what standards should we use to determine who lives and who dies? That depends on your worldview.

Maybe the single biggest issue in the debate over health-care reform is cost. By “cost” most people mean how we are going to pay for the president’s and Congress’s proposals.But there’s a more important question of cost when it comes to health-care reform—that is, the price paid by the most vulnerable among us.

In a recent New York Times magazine article, ethicist Peter Singer explains “why we must ration health care.” Singer, a brilliant writer and a master logician, begins by pooh-poohing the idea that “it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives.”After all, Singer is right when he says that “we already put a dollar value on human life.” Mattresses aren't as fire-resistant as they could be because government officials have decided that it would be too expensive to save those additional lives.

Still, Singer couldn’t resist the temptation to play God. He rejects the idea that the “good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved.” In his utilitarian calculus, the “death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities.”

How? Through the use of a “quality-adjusted-life-year,” or QALY. Say, for example, that people prefer living five years disability free to living 10 years with quadriplegia. Then, Singer reasons, when it comes to rationing health care, we ought to treat “life with quadriplegia as half as good as non-disabled life.” Believe me, he is not kidding.

What’s even more telling are the considerations Singer says we should not take into account—for instance, whether a patient is a mom or a dad. Thinking about a patient’s children, he says, “increases the scope for subjective—and prejudiced—judgments.”As abhorrent as Singer’s ideas are, they are coldly consistent with utilitarian thinking that now dominates medical ethics. As early as the 1990s, Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the president’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, envisioned “not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” Why? Because, he claimed, they are “prevented from being or becoming participating citizens.”

I’m sorry, but this is the same logic the Nazis used to exterminate the physically and mentally handicapped.The only viable alternative to this horrific utilitarian and materialist vision is the imago Dei: the Christian belief that man is created in the image of God.Being created in the imago Dei endows every person with dignity—a dignity that is not derived from the majority’s opinion (or a government definition) about the quality of their life or their contribution to society.In the absence of this belief, every decision about the allocation of health care—and indeed about any area of life—becomes an occasion for the young and strong to impose their will on the old and weak.

The word for this is “tyranny.” And all the hand-wringing and rationalizations about the need to overhaul the health-care system shouldn’t distract us from the very real danger of nationalizing health care and granting government the power to decide whose life is worth living.I say leave it to the family and the doctors as it is today.

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About Me

We are two goofie people that got married back in June of 2001 then 6 years later we made another goofie precious little girl named Sofia then we waited a year and decided to procreate another baby girl. We also have two goofie dogs, Lenny and Billy. We live in this goofie house close to a walking trail and we are very happy in our little goofie world.

The Real Deal

Make love a priority. Corinthians1 13

1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8Love never fails.

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Excerpt from Purpose Driven Life

Life is all about love.Because God is love, the most important lesson he wants you to learn on earth is how to love. It is in loving that we are most like him, so love is the foundation of every command he has given us "The whole Law can be summed up in this one command: Love others as you Love yourself." Learning to love unselfishly is not an easy task. It runs counter to our self-centered nature. That's why we're give an a lifetime to learn it....

... Love cannot be learned in isolation. You have to be around people- irritating, imperfect, frustrating people...

..Let love be your greatest aim...

Excerpt #3 from PDL

Love Is an Action12/18/2008Dear children, let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions. 1 John 3:18 (NLT)*** *** *** ***Love is something you do. Do you really love someone? Let’s see how you act toward that person. You show love by what you do, not just by what you feel.Love is more than attraction and more than arousal. It’s also more than sentimentality, like so many of today’s songs suggest. By this standard, is love dead when the emotion is gone? No, not at all. Because love is an action; love is a behavior.Over and over again, in the Bible, God commands us to love each other. And you can’t command an emotion. If I told you “Be sad!” right now, you couldn’t be sad on cue. Just like an actor, you can fake it, but you’re not wired for your emotions to change on command. Have you ever told a little kid, “Be happy!” I’m trying, daddy!If love were just an emotion, then God couldn’t command it. But love is something you do. It can produce emotion, but love is an action.The Bible says, “Let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions” (1 John 3:18 NLT). We can talk a good act: “I love people.” But do we really love them? Do you really love them? Our love is revealed in how we act toward them.

Excerpt #2 from PDL

Love Is a Choice2008/11/25… That you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Deuteronomy 30:20 (NIV)*** *** *** ***Love is a choice and a commitment. You choose to love or you choose not to love.Today we’ve bought into this myth that love is uncontrollable, that it’s something that just happens to us; it’s not something we control. In fact, even the language we use implies the uncontrollability of love. We say, “I fell in love,” as if love is some kind of a ditch. It’s like I’m walking along one day and bam! – I fell in love. I couldn’t help myself.But I have to tell you the truth – that’s not love. Love doesn’t just happen to you. Love is a choice and it represents a commitment.There’s no doubt about it, attraction is uncontrollable and arousal is uncontrollable. But attraction and arousal are not love. They can lead to love, but they are not love. Love is a choice.You must choose to love God; he won’t force you to love him (Deuteronomy 30:20). You can thumb your nose at God and go a totally different way. You can destroy your life if you choose to do that. God still won’t force you to love him. Because he knows love can’t be forced.And this same principle is true about your relationships: you can choose to love others, but God won’t force you to love anyone.